Monday, February 21, 2011

This release marks the second record with Arnel Pineda, following 2008’s “Revelation.”

The Kevin Shirley-produced album is being billed by Journey guitarist Neal Schon as a rock record.

“It sounds amazing,” Schon told VH1. “I’m in love with the record, which I haven’t said for a long time. I really fought for this record to be the way it is. It’s a rock record. It’s built for the places we’re about to play.”

“We’re playing a lot of big shows – South America and Europe – and we’re going to be touring the whole world on and off for two years,” continued Schon. “So with the addition of Arnel, we’ve become more of an international band which has been really great. We busted all kinds of markets wide open. So I wrote for what I felt we were missing in our show. We've got a lot of hits to play and we have to play those but there's plenty of time to do some new stuff too so we're gonna mix it up."

Pineda hooked up with the band in 2007 after Schon watched some of Arnel’s live videos with Flipino rock band The Zoo, on YouTube. Pineda is a virtual dead-ringer for the voice of former Journey singer Steve Perry, who sang on the band’s biggest hits.

"We like his energy,” keyboardist Jonathan Cain told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “He's brought a lot of heart and soul to this band.”

Cain describes Eclipse as "a concept record with some spiritual themes to it. Pretty tough, hard-hitting stuff. This is Journey with big combat boots on. And helmet and a rifle."

Cain's lyrics sustain the band's hopeful themes of "searching for soulfulness and enlightenment and love and all the stuff that Journey's about." But the album also has a larger dynamic sweep with "some darker stuff in there."

"We just felt like it was time to send a message to the world about how we feel about life in general," he says.

The album incorporates Hindu principles of Tantra, "the belief that life is kind of a weave, a circle of energy, a life force that's woven with the universe in all of us. We dove deep into it."

Cain goes so far as to call the album "one of those headphone records."